


Spine is Fine!

by VoiceOfNurse



Series: Chris Does China... or is that China Does Chris (in). [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure, Chicken Soup, China, Culture Shock, Diary/Journal, Food Poisoning, Travel, Worst Trip Ever, but not the sort of chicken soup you want it to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 11:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2506466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoiceOfNurse/pseuds/VoiceOfNurse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Christopher Maxey thought he was ready for China. Christopher Maxey had actually never been more wrong. </p>
<p>"I speak about six words in Chinese, despite thinking that I was pretty fluent before I ended up in this Godforsaken country, and every one of them seems to revolve around ordering a drink and finding the toilet."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spine is Fine!

**Author's Note:**

> A tribute to the Great Inspider, who took an amazing trip around China, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Dear Diary, 

You know that saying, about life giving you lemons? Well, sometimes life doesn’t give you lemons. In fact, sometimes you want nothing more than for life to give you lemons, because then you could make lemonade and be happy. But this is me, Diary, so life isn’t ever going to give me lemons. 

No. Today, Diary, we’re going to talk about the day life gave me a chicken spine in my soup. 

I guess it starts with China. I think everything starts with China, given that my life is going to END with China. China is legitimately going to kill me, that’s going to be it for me, and I’m going to go down in history as one of those people who went to a foreign country and died like an idiot. 

But I digress. Probably a sign of my deep seated emotional trauma. Spine soup will do that to you, Diary. So, it starts with China. My idea, I signed up for it, blame the idiocy or the sambuca or whatever else you want to blame, but I ended up there. But China? Complete lie. You think China is going to be filled with awesome, interesting Chinese people and culture and awesome. 

China is not filled with culture and awesome. China is filled with dogs, and street venders, and Satan. Satanic ritual soup with spine in it. But we’ll get to that. First, we have to talk about the street venders, and probably a little bit about the dogs, because the street venders kill and serve the dogs. 

Believe it or not, this all started because I didn’t want to eat a dog. I like dogs, quite a lot, actually, but not in an ‘oh, let’s put that in a sandwich sort of way. And these people? They’d serve you a dog sandwich, probably with added Salmonella and a side order of Campylobacter. Food hygiene is some sort of urban myth out here, I swear. 

So, this story starts with my being hungry. Because, seriously, it had been days since I’d had food, and there was this food everywhere, but the food made the British person in me cry because it was out in the sun with the flies and the dust and the oh-god-why. So, I’m hungry, and given that dying of starvation in China is about as uncool a death as you can possibly get, I decide to pick something that looks safe. 

How do I pick something that looks safe, you ask? God only knows. I speak about six words in Chinese, despite thinking that I was pretty fluent before I ended up in this Godforsaken country, and every one of them seems to revolve around ordering a drink and finding the toilet. And even then I’m not sure if I’m asking the right thing, because the looks I get… Jesus. I’m not sure if they’re staring at me because I’m white and ginger, or because I just asked them if they wanted a blowjob when I actually want nothing more than a burger and some chips. 

So, blowjobs and bathrooms aside, I was hungry, wanted something that looked safe and familiar, because some of the stuff on those trays looked genuinely alien. Barbeque, that looked safe. You can’t really go wrong with that, can you? It’s cooked, you can see it’s cooked, and it’s basically recognisable as food. 

Yeah. Never eat the barbeque. Chinese barbeque is apparently directly related to all things evil in the world. 

Diary, it tasted so good. Like, beyond good. I’d barely eaten in three days because I was terrified of the food, but the duck from that stall was out of this world. Amazing. Delicious. Out of this world level awesome. 

...for about five hours. 

Yeah, apparently you should never order off the barby in China. Apparently what I thought was ‘can I have some of that duck, please?’ was actually ‘I’d like some food poisoning with a side-order of death, if you’d be so kind’. 

Worst. Evening. Ever. 

I have never been so sick in my life. In. My. Life. 

And squat toilets? Bunkbeds? These things are horrendous on their own. Combine them with the worst case of food poisoning this side of being legitimately dead and you have Hell. Right there. 

Anyway, I didn’t actually start this to talk about my bowel habits (but seriously, whoever invented the squat toilet needs to be shot). I started this all to talk about the spine in my soup. Because traumatising? That is pretty much the textbook definition of it. 

I only went for the soup because I was still feeling like my stomach had turned itself inside out, crawled up my throat, done a backflip, and then tried to put itself back before I noticed. Hint: I noticed. Soup, I thought, would be safe. I should have known better. 

But chicken soup? Isn’t that what they tell you to eat when you’re sick as a dog. Sick as one of the dogs on the Chinese barbeque, I was. Maybe that’s just on the telly, though. Like China is this amazing place full of culture and awesome on the telly, and then you get there and find that it actually just makes you want to die. 

Like the soup. Literally, this is days later, when I’ve finally been able to crawl out of the bathroom and face the world again. I’m pretty certain that I’ve lost about half my body weight by this point, and I’m staggering about looking like a survivor of the black death, so there has to be food somewhere in my future. Getting back on the horse, etcetera. Can’t starve to death just because you have PTSD about the squat toilet and the bunk beds. 

So I order the soup. Nice, safe, normal chicken soup. And it looks normal. Yeah, there are these little bits floating in it, but China is nothing if not prolific in its little floating bits. They looked like meat. Hell… officially, if we’re being totally technical here, they were meat. But seriously, Diary, nothing says ‘unsettling’ better than poking your chopsticks into your perfectly normal looking chicken soup and pulling out a spine. 

A spine. 

An entire, whole, vertebrae-and-all spine. Jesus, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the head had still been on. My face must have been a picture, that or I had this gaping maw of absolute shock on because I was pretty certain that the ghost of christmas chicken was looking back at me. 

Want to know the worst thing, Diary? I ate it. I actually ate it. Picked the spine out, threw it in the bin, and then went on like it had never happened. Shock, I’m certain of it. What I really needed was an orange blanket and a cup of sweet tea, but instead I get a bowl of spine soup and a squat loo. 

And wouldn’t you believe it? Not a scrap of campylobacter in sight. Apparently there’s a rule in China: Spine is Fine. It’s just everything else that makes you sick as a barbequed dog.


End file.
